Revived abuse crisis, newfangled simony dominated the church's 2018

https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/distinctly-catholic/revived-abuse-crisis-newfangled-simony-dominated-churchs
The problem of the Church is not going to be solved by theology. An attempt to do so is the blind leading the blind. While clericalism is a cancer eating at the Church, the clericalist problem is that we look at it as us vs them. From the top, us is the clergy with the people as them. The laity has the same problem. They see the hierarchy as the "them" that must be reformed.  Clericalism is boogeyman, the same way that modernism were the boogeyman for Popes Pius IX and X. Their answer was authoritarianism, including the creation of a network of informants that would leave Fidel Castro and the East German Stasi impressed.

Archbishop Rembert Weakland documented how this authoritarianism continued under St. John Paul when Cardinal Rigali managed the culture of information during his Vatican days. The target of the modern version were homosexuals like Weakland although he never bothered children. If McCarrick had been able to live his truth, he would not have either.

The culture that sought to find homosexual scapegoats is designed to preserve the celibate norms of the Church, which have their roots in a Neoplatonic asexuality, not some imaged holiness. Such holiness lacks the humility to move forward. It also deathly afraid of the ordination of women, who would surely break the awkward boys club now running the Church. That culture gave us the bad old days when the Church was rotten on the inside but a pillar of holiness on the outside during the height of Catholic influence in the 1950. It did not last.

Holiness will not get the Church out of this problem. A warm and fuzzy culture in the clergy, in essence an escape into modernism, is as wrong headed as the Syllabi of Errors, Qudra Cua and Pascendi Dominici Gregis. The modern solution is not Gaudium et spes or Evangelii Gaudium.  The only document that gets us close to a solution is Dignitatis Humanae, which utterly rejects the anti-modernists, not that it helped change the clerical culture, it simply drove it underground.

The Church's mission is to look for a savior. When the problem of child sexual abuse came to the fore, the hierarchy found its savior in its lawyers, which restricted information on the scandal to save the Church's reputation and preserve attorney-client privilege. This type of Omerta was comfortable not just in the American Church, but world wide.

What Michael Sean calls Libertarianism allows him to maintain the myth that there is only one form of libertarianism. There are, in fact, three. One is the purist libertarianism of Ron and Rand Paul. It is so fringe, that it is not a worry. There is also the social libertarianism (or left-leaning libertarianism) that is akin to social liberalism. It seeks individuality over hierarchy. It rejects regulation of homosexuals, abortion and feminism from the culture and the Church. It (we) would ordain women.

Right-wing or economic libertarianism seeks an end to government regulation over private authority. The other word for it is Capitalism. It's major innovation is a strong CEO which is legitimized by a Board of Directors that is accountable only to itself. Under capitalism, the shareholders are the Them in much the same way that the Clergy treats the Laity. It is dangerous because it is almost exactly in line with the Church's usual authoritarian culture. This would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Neither spiritual renewal among the clergy and continued shielding of responsibility through capitalist structures. In much the same way that employee-ownership is the answer to capitalism, democracy in the Church is the answer to its structural-function problems (to borrow a term from sociology for what is a social problem). I am not talking about the Congregationalism that emerged from the Puritans, which threw out both the hierarchy and the patrimony of the Church.

I seek to preserve much of our patrimony, although the sexism and crypto-asexuality should be laid bare as abnormality rather than holiness. Adding a female matriarchy to the patriarchy still preserves the division of the Church into as and them. Rather, I would, as stated before, have the people elect lay (meaning non-celibate) deacons to mange parish and charitable affairs while leaving the clergy in tact (although women would be included, as well as the married and the gay). Both clergy and laity would then elect the local Ordinary as Pastor, not governor. The Church will not be fixed by the Papacy from above, but from responsibility from below.

The Clericalists did not cause our problems. We did, both clerical and lay, in seeking the divide between us and them. All of the faithful must take responsibility for sexual abuse. The people in the pews let it happen. The victims went along with preserving the reputation of the Church. The lawyers did nothing to them,they were willing participants to preserving the reputation of the clergy. Ending the clergy v. lay divide the answer. We must end Medievalism in the Church and take responsibility for it, with the bishops rather than blaming them for this crisis. If Francis can pull that rabbit out the hat next year, there is hope. If not, we must act from below, but not by trading episcopal authoritarianism for the capitalistic kind.